Having a very hard time linking the person from the resume to the jobs:
Marketing Associate, Technical Support and Publications. These are jobs that more often than not require a meticulous and precise nature - especially for anything print related in design. The CV is horribly unprofessional and even back then would have been sidelined for 90% of jobs. Definately had no IT skills either the website she made was terrible even for the time period - this person was not working in design at any point in her life you can see that from everything she created from the CV through to the website.
Very interesting case, a real mystery this one!
Yes, her Resume/CV is surprisingly unprofessional; at the least, it would have benefited from another person reviewing it & providing her some feedback. The two notorious typos in it -- "layed" & "varies" aren't in themselves typos, but correct spellings of homonyms; compare these to the chronic problem of catching & correcting from/form typos. Methinks LEK depended on her spellchecker too much. Her degree clearly wasn't in English.
I've planned to share a close reading of this resume, but I wanted to first get the opinion of a friend of mine who has a few decades of experience in graphic design & his resume includes names like Nike, Adidas, & Columbia Sportswear. I suspect his opinion of her work in this area would confirm my impression that her jobs were very much entry-level; according to what he's told me over the years, graphic design -- even for work like marketing brochures & fliers -- is a field where knowing other people is often far more important than what you know. Or a professional-looking resume.
But about the parts of her resume that refer to her computer skills... Let me offer my opinion, based on having worked a couple of decades in that industry. If she had any business-related web development experience in the period she indicates, 1992-1998, she would have been far ahead of the curve, & likely would have found her skills in serious demand; there just weren't that many people with that kind of experience. But it's clear that section of her resume is (to put it politely) full of fluff: had she any real web experience, she would not only mention items like Quark, Photoshop, Dreamweaver & FrontPage, but server software (e.g., Netscape Server, Apache, IIS, & others now forgotten), & scripting languages used in CGI scripts like Perl & PHP. Just because she listed skills like C, visual Basic & gcc doesn't mean she had any programming ability; coding shops would be looking for experience with specific libraries or areas -- such as user experience, graphics, network drivers, etc. I expect that an interview based on her computing skills with IT-savvy people would have been an unpleasant experience for her.
Now she could have gotten away with these statements back in the high tech boom years of the 1990s, when a lot of people who weren't really tech-savvy got sucked into the industry (& dumped out of it when the industry cratered in 2001), but by 2002 there were a lot of competent & experienced computer professionals unemployed who had never been prior to that. I'm a little surprised she was hired for the support position she held at Keyautomation -- unless it was *really* part-time, as in less than 10 hours a week.
On the other hand, there are only a few significant gaps in her resume where LEK was out of work for any period of time: one of 2 months, another of 3 months. She could hustle, & maybe her work ethic made up for her impairments with details. Or maybe her attention to detail -- some have speculated LEK had OCD -- did not include her writing skills. Typos & ungrammatical writing is chronic amongst programmers, even highly talented ones.
